Proposed UNBC engineering program takes the next step

UNBC has taken the next step towards having the first engineering program in Northern BC.

The university’s Senate and Board of Governors has approved the program’s curriculum and is preparing to send it to the province for funding.

“For us, we are very fortunate because we already have a number of qualified faculty.” said President Dr. Daniel Weeks “We will have to add some additional faculty to support the program, we already have some pretty good lab space that we can repurpose – that costs money to do.”

The school’s five year capital plan shows a $3.5M request over two years, requesting funding from Victoria for renovations for a space that will accommodate 400 full time undergraduates, 20 graduates and 20 faculty and staff once the programs are running.

UNBC will become just the fourth institute in BC to offer a Bachelor of Applied Science in Civil Engineering alongside UBC, UVic and BCIT. The current one of a kind UNBC/UBC Environmental Engineering Program will also be expanded to a stand alone program for UNBC.

The average age of a civil engineer in BC is 50 years old, and just 299 students graduated in 2015. Engineers Canada projects an average of 667 job openings per year from 2015-2019 province wide.

With natural resource extraction and rapid industrial development taking place across Northern BC, Weeks says there is a massive appetite for an engineering program within the region.

“When I arrived here in Prince George, it was made crystal clear to me engineering the north was something that this community had tremendous passion for.”

“I want to say it’s almost equal to the passion that they had about the medical program here in the north and we now know ten years later how incredibly important and successful that’s been.”

Depending on how the funding application is received, a small cohort could be learning by Sept 2017, with Weeks noting that the school would also have to undertake a marketing push for the program.

However if the newly launched Wood Engineering Masters program is any indication, the university will not have to look very far for students. Weeks says they have already received 40-50 applications – meaning the sophomore cohort could be as big as 20 students.